Sunday, May 22, 2016

The apathetic suicide of the West

Maybe you believe that Hillary would have been in a richly deserved jail cell long ago were she not a protected Democrat. Maybe you believe the reason a dubious candidate like Donald Trump got legs is conservative voters are fed up with Republicans in Washington selling out to become part of that corrupt cesspool that ignores Constitutional limits on the federal government. Maybe you are an independent or Democrat with deep worries about the future of our country.If so, I would agree with you and observe you are far more serious than the oblivious American public and trivia-focused news media, jointly trapped in their own orgy of liberal navel-gazing on marginal issues like gay marriage, transgender bathroom rules, global warming, or banning on-campus words called “micro-aggression” to protect college students from the collision with daily life.

Meanwhile these same well-intended people who believe government rules are the answer to life’s warts and wrinkles are perfectly willing to ignore a president stepping outside his Constitutional boundaries to ignore laws he doesn’t like, pulling the teeth from our military by cuts and making sensitivity the standard of measure, piling ever more duplication and overlap of costly federal social services and running a national debt that cannot be repaid up through the stratosphere.

Can our country recover from the damage? For reasons I’ll save for another column, I doubt we can even if we elect Superman as President.

But those are our immediate problems. If you are willing to think outside your comfort zone, let me suggest there is an even more lethal longer-term threat.

There is a storm of global human conflict brewing, and I wonder how many of you see it coming as I do. It is coming, I believe, because we have lost the intrinsic protection summed up in the simple word, “isolation.”

Human beings have been collecting into herds of various descriptions and killing each other with vigor for a million reasons since man first sharpened stone weapons around campfires. There are logical, understandable and also completely irrational reasons for civilizations to violently collide including language, culture, religious beliefs, territory, competition for resources and so on.

Many of us are old enough to remember when we were safely isolated from those who hate us by distance, oceans, geographic features like mountain ranges, even more fragile boundaries like borders. If radically conflicting civilizations have no contact, we can live in peace.

But the protection of that isolation is gone. Now every bunch that hates us is in our face. We are victims of the technological success we have achieved, mostly developed in America and shared with the world to make us extraordinarily connected worldwide.

Every group with a gripe, whether local or in the middle of nowhere, can find sympathetic activists by cell phone or the Internet and collaborate to inflict their grievance on the target of their choice, with confidence the effects of any extreme violence will be multiplied by a voraciously hungry media spreading their hideous story to fill too many 24/7 news channels.

As the disaffected organize, using newfound tools of computers and staying informed by our own media, they become smarter daily about the weak spots in America, and there are many. Our citizens are obliviously self-absorbed. Our elected leaders cannot see past their own constituency or the next news cycle affecting their own re-election.

Our borders are not enforced. Vigilance against illegal entry has been replaced by a softened cultural change and policies welcoming and protecting illegals with the cover word of “undocumented,” as if they deserve documents that have not yet arrived to legitimize their presence in our country. And of course the illegals, whether from Mexico or more remote countries who hate us, receive government services funded by the taxes we pay.

The “melting pot” of America has morphed into “multiculturalism” in which we are scolded by liberals to accept all cultures as equals, and our own government policies fail to encourage learning the English language or any form of assimilation.